Silence please

Here is a new rule in our office. We have to practice being silent for 1hr. every day

What does it mean?

No phone calls.

No talking to your colleagues

No online chat with colleague

No going out for a Break

Purpose:

When I asked few people regarding this, they said “this is to avoid intake of new work”. During this hour you are not supposed to get any new work assigned to you.

But what is the reality?

Organization wants to force you to follow something like this??

Ok I believe in 90:15 rule.

Work for 90 minutes, totally focused, dedicated and with great enthusiasm

And then take a break for 15 mins . I’m sure it increases your productivity.

OK during silent hrs. what if I get personal call which is very urgent. (May be a medical emergency. Who Knows?)

I cannot tell all my relatives or friends that I’m practicing silent hrs. and ignore the call.(when there is something important to talk)

Ok they say you can take customer calls. Then the very purpose of silent hrs. is again defeated.Phew!!

Ok there is an emergency call and I’m not supposed to take call inside my cubicle or work area.But I’m not even supposed to go out.

I keep getting calls from different people regarding different high priority thing. It might be to discuss about offer letter or to schedule an interview, or ask any important information. Now how would I tackle this during silent hour? Let go an opportunity ?

OK even if I don’t open my mouth, does it mean my mind is silent?

I don’t think so, because I get so many thoughts every minute, so many business related ideas, and it might be necessary to convey it to someone. So what do I do? Wait for 1 hr?

Thought is a vital, living force, the most vital, subtle and irresistible
force that exists in the universe. … Thoughts are living things.
Swami Sivananda

OK today there was delivery man who was calling me to ask about my residential address, since he got confused with the route.he had to deliver house hold appliances. He kept calling me.

Should I not receive the call?, should I keep him waiting in the midway for so long time just because we are practicing silent hrs? No, I cannot agree with this rule in such scenarios

That’s is unfair, he is your boss but not god who is he to decide if you can’t speak or not , we’ve been given a beautiful gift by being able to talk and express our thoughts and feelings, and you have some beautiful thoughts to express .I think you and your collaeuges should all protest, silence is good but only if you feel like it and if you want to not because he wants too, your boss is such a dictator, anyways Goodluck and I hope everything is going to be fine 🙂 🙂

I absolutely respect your decision .. As a lead I have to keep interacting with customers. Communication is business so they cannot restrict me too much. And yeah if there is an emergency personal call I will go out n speak . let them escalate . I will give a genuine reason.. 🙂 thank u so much for supporting

U r right. We are thinking of the same . let’s see it for few days. After all we are in corporate world u know n not in school and we know something like this doesn’t increase productivity. Silence has to be from mind .. And that’s not silent anyway when we are at work. Its always thinking about different things.

Silent hours for a good cause makes sense, but the one implemented in your office seems weird. I can’t sit quietly, except, when I am near the sea and rightly said, when does our mind rest? I guess when we meditate, otherwise, staying quiet in office for an hour with customer call recieving permit is ridiculous. O.O

point is that you have to look at the bigger picture. the decision involves CEO, Senior Managers,and then Supervisors. so we cannot target alone . lot many members involved . but yeah lets see how it goes for few days

I don’t know which industry you work in, but I work in IT. A friend of mine told me about this being practiced in her team and somehow it really worked for them! Sure they find it irritating that they cannot communicate AT all… but their productivity really increased. And they selected the hour in such a way to ensure minimal calls and meetings. They doing it on a trial… Let’s see

yeah kind of claustrophobic feeling sometimes. my idea behind silence is just to uncluttered your mind filled with so many chaotic thoughts . i dont know whats the thought process behind organisations’s decision. let see how i could achieve that ..

Sounds great, but a failed rule, can make a silent rule for fifteen minutes per hour,still I don’t think it will work, we have a rule to blink eyes every twenty minutes 🙂 and two minutes break from monitor 🙂

More and more the powers that be want to control our lives. They threaten, loss of job, school, etc., to keep us in line. This silent period is unrealistic and unfair. But the thing is people are NEVER asked about the things that happen to them. This is a power play and a control issue. I don’t know if you can get a petition or meeting to discuss it or get everyone to ignore it and do as they wish. Fear usually keeps people from doing what they know they should do and that’s why those in control have power over them. If they can get everyone to be quiet what will they get you to do next?

thank you for your views.
i thought of practicing it better in my own way. my idea of practicing silence differs much from their thought process. although action might be same i practice it to achieve my goal behind being silent.
yes , fear stops us from being what we are . we don’t want to be controlled .. i agree to that.. i will have to wait and see the progress in this ..

You are selling your time to those people. They are paying you to sit quietly for an hour. It would be a good time to quiet down inside and learn to enjoy your Maker, on their payroll no less. Let the mind go berserk. It’ll calm down and shut up after awhile. There are other parts to your being that are more critical and much more enjoyable. 🙂

Has your boss explained the benefits of the practice to you? I’m going through some new policies at work, too. One of them is for everyone to leave the office by 7PM. That is healthy, as people used to stay at work until 10PM. Other things are annoying and no one likes it, but as long as everyone is subject to the same rules, we’re all fine. I like to meditate, and I need a lot of thinking time at work. Having down time where no one is speaking to me helps me to be more creative. Not everyone likes to be quiet or left alone, but I work in an environment with lots of similar personalities to miine so it helps we all want the same things and get annoyed by the same things. I hope your day is going well, so far. x

thank you for reading and a very good response . well, its not just a boss. its a collective decisions taken by the higher management of an organization. i have been repeating that my idea and objective of silence differs from organization’s concept. silence for me is to unclutter the mind. we always have this 2 states within.. rajas and tamas , rajas being a little aggressive state and tamas being more polite state and art of meditation is to bring the balance between these two state.isn’t it ?? i don mean to sit in place where people are shouting like in fish market and hate silence. no. silence has its benefits yes i agree but just that imposing this forcefully and not allowing to freely communicate the ideas or not to answer emergency calls will many a time complicate things more ..
being silent and working on customer issues parallely doesnt serve purpose of silent hours is my point .
it was very thought provoking response i got thank you. x

Thanks for this, and now I have some reading got do on these two meditative states you’ve mentioned. It’s true we have to be adapting to the environment. I can meditate anywhere now, but that takes self control and discipline. I don’t think, and this is in agreement with you, that enforcing this externally is going to help productivity.

Sometimes, I believe that it is thoughts like these which never allow us to make time for ourselves, to contemplate or work in silence, and silence being a rarity these days, maybe the intentions behind this “silent hour” were correct. The implementation, however, could be a bit more thoughtful. Hope everything works out! 🙂

contemplation in silence is a good thing….much needed in today’s world…..but it needs to be practiced in an appropriate place…..at an appropriate time…..thoughts often come when we are least equipped to catch hold of them….(it happens to me most when i don’t have any place to jot them down !) and then poof!!! they disappear……such is the intricacy of our lives…..but good luck to you with the silent hours…:)